What a Sword is For
by Ember A. Keelty
Summary: PM in the wasteland.  She refuses to let the sword be symbolic.


How is she even supposed to get the blood off of this thing? In stories people wipe them on the grass, but there's no grass here, and when she tries the sand it just sticks in horrible wet clumps and makes everything worse. This is only the first and least of the challenges she'll have to contend with out here on the alien wastelands, so it won't do to get frustrated, but she's sick of the sight and she's sick of the smell and she wants to be done with it once and for all.

She isn't done with the sword, though. It's tempting to think of it as tainted, to cast it to the ground and leave it for lost. But this is a hard world, and there are still plenty of things it could be good for.

Her old clothes serve well enough as a cleaning rag. She feels oddly hesitant to use them that way, for reasons she can't quite pin down, but the fact is that they are already ruined, and even if they weren't she would still be obligated to discard them. The first thing her sword does for her, once it's clean, is cut her new ones out of the golden cloth she took from the Battlefield. After a bit of consideration, she cuts some cloth for a scabbard as well. A part of her thinks that hauling around a sword wrapped in a war banner may be laying it on a bit thick, but, unlike the shroudwear, this isn't about her identity; it's about keeping her hands free and not accidentally gutting herself if she falls the wrong way.

She carries it and carries on.

—

The sword is a good thing, and she is lucky to have it. It is for cutting or prying open containers full of beans, corn, soups, dried or syrup-soaked fruits. It is for hacking down doors that have not decayed enough for her to knock them off their hinges or break through them like boards of plywood. It is for scraping away the hard-packed dirt beneath the sifting sands until she reaches mud she can suck on to keep her going until the next dead city. It is even for slicing the rusted stems of mailboxes she picks, like flowers, simply because looking at them makes her feel happy. It isn't for throwing tantrums and breaking things indiscriminately, except when the futility of everything starts to overwhelm her and it's either that or she doesn't know what. It isn't for swinging around at hallucinations, except when her nerves are worn so ragged that she simply can't help herself.

There's one thing it _absolutely _is not for, ever, no matter how hopeless or worn she gets: it is not for helping her to escape her exile. Sometimes, when she isn't paying enough attention, her brain goes to work on the problem of what the fastest and easiest way out of the wasteland would be, if she were ever to change her mind about that — whether it's possible to slit one's own throat effectively, whether dry sand can be packed tightly enough around the hilt to make the blade stand straight out, how one should orient one's body to fall on it if so — but she always stops it the moment she catches it. She will not throw away the thing she killed for. That would be monstrous, and she is not a monster.

Besides, she is going to find a way to heal this planet. Who else will do that? And who else will deliver all these poor forgotten letters?

—

The gold of Prospit dulls to the drabber gold of the sands she treads, then to the dingy gray of the dust coating the ruins she raids for supplies. Eventually, she suspects, it will be bleached as pale as her carapace. Memories fade with the fabric, and with them a bit of the old pain, but it hurts just as much to know that the last traces of the home she loved are being steadily erased.

Of course, the banner she wears as a cloak was probably only ever Prospitian in the same sense that white pawns are. Most likely it was manufactured either in the Veil or on the Battlefield itself, and never spent two seconds on-planet. Its only real connection to the kingdom it stood for was its color, and now, for all anyone can tell, it could just as easily have been violet.

She has nothing to link her to Prospit. Yet, after all these years, she still has the Regisword to link her to Derse. Worse still, it links her to _him_. _He_ threatened her with it, _he_ put it into her hands, _he _sent his man after her and drove her to use it to kill. Sometimes she hates it. Sometimes she wants to discard it for the wind and sand to bury. But without it, she knows, they would bury her, too, so she always gets over that feeling before long.

She supposes it could be symbolic — but no, instead she thinks it is just useful.

—

She can use it as one all she likes, but a sword is not a can opener. It isn't even a hatchet or fire ax. A sword is _for_ spilling blood, and hers has done so before. That it would do so again was, she realizes now, inevitable.

The man she has pinned to the ground babbles at her — "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't _want_ to blow you up! Why would I want to hurt the first people I've seen in years? It's just my job, see? I am the law, and you were trespassing!" He's clearly terrified and confused, and she feels for him, she really does, but not enough to compromise her own survival. He threatened both the successful performance of her duties and her very life. That means he dies. Still, there's something about hearing another person's voice after all this time. She hesitates, the point of her blade pressing against his carapace without punching through.

The other, smaller, friendlier Dersite is babbling too — "Don't, please don't, please not again! Can't you see we have more in common with each other than we do with them? No, no, the war is over!" He was a pawn, she realizes, and flashes to the memory of a corpse just his shape and size lying in two pieces on the checkered ground, bisected across the abdomen. She recalls how different his face looked from that of the man she killed, how obvious it was that he had died in agony. Feeling a bit ill, she lifts the sword and clumsily flips it around in her hands. Before she can bring it down again to chop off the head of her attacker, the pawn throws himself on top of his fellow Dersite, putting his own body in the path of the blade.

"Get out of my way," she tells him.

"No!"

"I don't want to kill you."

"Do you really want to kill _him_?" he demands.

"I don't _want_ to kill anyone," she says, because she's still trying to remember how this talking thing works, and getting the thoughts in her head out with her voice is enough of a challenge without also having to figure out which ones to hold back.

"Can you see where we are right now?" he asks, and clearly does not mean it rhetorically. "This isn't the Battlefield. You don't have to do anything you don't want to. You're free."

Slowly, giving her all the time she would need to react, should she choose to, he reaches up. Only when his hand brushes against her own does she realize that she's shaking. She lets him take the sword from her, then falls onto her back and stares vacantly at the eternally cloudless sky while her body lets out tension through shudders and gasping breaths.

She was really going to do it. She was really going to murder someone lying helpless and pleading for his life. Finally, after all these years, she has found other people, and it turns out she is no longer fit to be around them.

"Oh!" the pawn exclaims suddenly after a long, strained silence. "Oh, of course! It's perfect!" He jumps to his feet and scuttles off in the direction of the cylindrical flight machine he arrived in.

"Uh," the other Dersite mutters nervously, now that they're alone. "Sorry for trying to kill you, I guess."

"Likewise," she mumbles. Then, because that's nowhere near enough, she adds, "The feeling is, um, mutual, I assure you."

After a very awkward minute or two, the pawn returns and, bouncing on his heels in excitement, presses an aluminum can labeled "PEAS" into one of her hands and her sword into the other.

"You there, sword lady!" he says in what is probably the most authoritative tone he can manage with his obvious elation. "Get up and put that can-opener to use!"


End file.
